XXX
WITH THE PHANTOMS
As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanicsof a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except ofdim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms ofhis boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet theghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry.At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his fatherwere to dine alone that evening.
They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report ofhis progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the lastcouncil of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son tobring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weeklyfunction as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fullyand candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in hisbrain and every doubt assailing his spirit.
By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growingimpatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. Whenhe entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desirethat must be satisfied immediately.
"Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to thebutler.
"Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for thenight," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, inview of the blank disappointment with which the information was received.
In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving thefood almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of hispresence at table by the servant's question if he should bring anothercourse. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to thedrawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again pouredout his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" whichmeant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying aftersaying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on themystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him.
And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person.She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in hisnature. That new life could not die, but without her it could notflourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to hisears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; itsent this note up to her room:
"MARY:
"In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't youhelp me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light,would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise tokeep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I willwait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will.
"JACK."
"All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer ina nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herselfappeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but insimple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him ina startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to theimpulsion of duty rather than choice.
"Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome ofmovement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion.
There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionshipon a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selectedfor her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal ofthe plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militantfeather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around herneck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. Hewas near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but thenearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to lifeand may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in themight of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry outanother declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was verystill. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playingnervously with the tip of her boa.
"I must be frank, very frank," he said.
"Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?"
"From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at oncerecognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politenessand his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers."
"Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered.
"I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me,and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change.And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to thedrawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome.You noticed it, too?"
"Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me thathe could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was aperceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining levelwith the flags.
"And on the pass you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes,almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impassable gulf betweenus. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?"
As he broke off passionately with this appeal, which was as the focus ofall the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under thelight of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in themustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there wasan effort at the old smile of comradeship.
"Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began."But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what Iknow that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about youand your father and your relations to us was the night after I returnedfrom the pass ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon tofrighten me with the risk you were taking."
"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followedan impulse."
"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Fatherand I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--thatthere is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There issomething akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. Ithink that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass;that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It wasthen that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you andyour father--you still wish to hear?"
"Yes!"
"And you will listen in silence?"
"Yes!"
"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I amgiving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, myfeelings."
"No, I will not argue."
Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been consciousthat they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he mighthave hazarded many guesses, every one serious.
"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the imageof your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and thechin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring fromanother source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the endyou would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break PedroNogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on thepass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said,victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant andinextinguishable in your veins."
"I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.
"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in thesheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father'sstory in everything, even in his marriage."
She paused.
"There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with myfather and mother?" he asked.
"Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe inJack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. Ipressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had tolive my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I washurting him sorely.
I was striking home into that past about which hewould never speak, though I know it still causes him many days ofsuffering."
"But on the desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed.
"Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past isnot shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I didtry, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him yourrequest; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what itmeant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was,and that he never wanted to think of that scene again."
It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They werereturning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing withthe boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were grippingso tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-redbackground. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid.
"Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating myfather's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellionagainst what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack,I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak ofher sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentionedher. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; andprobably, yes--probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am;and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life;and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldlysuccess. And, Jack, you forget--riding over the pass so grandly with yourimpulses, as if to want a thing is to get it--you--but we have had goodtimes together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and Ion the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, isbetween us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed atwork in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man,with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that Iunderstand even less than you!"
Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the dayof his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But hedid not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping himsilent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.
"And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared inthe doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck withfear, and how like yours it was--but more like John Prather's. And thehigh-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gownsbecame real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth,free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in theblood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!"
To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; andwith the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and aninvincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say wouldbe as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior tothe resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness herealized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as somethingthat would mind neither siege nor prayer.
"I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is allright!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping theboa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will beback in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass."
This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing,harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation afterthe duel in the _arroyo_ was over and he had used the right word when hertemples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were herobject, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch oftorture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back oncold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girlin armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in aframe; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.
"You don't mind if I tell you again--if I speak my one continuous thoughtaloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way thatI"--with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals--"I wouldbuild mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!"
"Foolish business, Jack!" she answered.
"Or drag a plow."
"Very hard work!"
"Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel."
"I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of thefirst week."
He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. Shehad answered with a precision that was more trying than silence.
"_I_ shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcomeme when I knocked off for the day," he declared. "You see, I can'thelp it. I can't help what is in me, just as surely as the breath oflife is in me."
"Jack!" she flashed back, with arresting sharpness, but without lookingaround, while her step quickened perceptibly, "suppose I say that I amsorry and I, too, cannot help it; that I, too, have temperament, as wellas you;" her tone was almost harsh; "that even you cannot have everythingyou command; that for you to want a thing does not mean that I want it;that I cannot help the fact that I do not--"
With a quick interruption he stayed the end of the sentence, as if itwere a descending blade.
"Don't say that!" he implored. "It is too much like taking a vow thatmight make you fearfully stubborn in order to live up to it. Perhaps thething will come some day. It's wonderful how such a thing does come. Yousee, I speak from experience," he went on, in wan insistence, with theentrance to the hotel in sight. "Why, it is there before you realize it,like the morning sunshine in a room while you are yet asleep. And youopen your eyes and there is the joyous wonder, settling itself allthrough you and making itself at home forever. You know for the firsttime that you are alive. You know for the first time that you were borninto this world merely because one other person was born into it."
"Very well said," she conceded, in hasty approval, without vouchsafinghim a glance. "I begin to think you get more inspiration for complimentson this side of the pass than on the other,"--and they were at the hoteldoor. Precipitately she hastened through it, as if with her last displayof strength after the exhaustion of that walk.
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